An impossible proposal?
December 12th, 2002
In proposing that the Arroyo government turn itself into a administration of national unity, House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. is saying that it isn’t—a fact obvious to anyone except, apparently, to Arroyo spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao.
Tiglao said the Arroyo administration had been trying to be an administration of national unity. If it has, it’s been going about it rather oddly. Mrs. Arroyo’s appointment of her husband Mike as ambassador to the country’s workers overseas (OFWs), for example, has provoked more division rather than unity, and for quite understandable reasons.
As ambassador to the global OFW community, Mr. Arroyo would be addressing the legal and other problems overseas workers run into while working in different cultures and legal systems. He would not be paid for this task, said the President. But he would be empowered to raise funds for the legal defense of OFWs and for the “blood money” that in certain Islamic countries can get a person accused of killing someone off the hook by paying the victim’s relatives with.
Since there are some four million overseas Filipino workers (the seven million figure often bandied about includes immigrants, who must be distinguished from OFWs) in almost every country in the world, and some of them are in varying degrees of trouble, we can imagine Mr. Arroyo’s life transformed into a perpetual odyssey to the Filipino community in exile—now flying to the Middle East to save a Filipino construction worker from the executioner’s ax for example, and the next day flying off to Singapore to prevent the caning of a domestic from Samar.
In doing this health- and even life-threatening task, Mr. Arroyo would not only be unsalaried; he would also be spending his own money. But that’s all right because he’ll be doing it for his countrymen and women, and GMA cares.
If Malacaņang was surprised at the skepticism and even outrage that this idea provoked, it must think Filipinos are retards. Anyone with half a brain and schooled in the cynical facts of Philippine politics would have immediately suspected that, stripped of sentimental hogwash, fielding Mr. Arroyo into the OFW community sounds exactly like a less than brilliant plan to make sure that Mrs. Arroyo has the OFW vote in her pocket by 2004, and to raise funds for the election that year.
The key word is “election.” By now it has become conventional wisdom in Philippine political, business, media and academic circles that Mrs. Arroyo is focused on winning in 2004, and that she will do everything she can to achieve that consuming purpose. Toward that end she has tried to unite behind her every group, sector and class, plus the United States government for good measure, which has anything to gain from her compliant (to them) presidency.
To win their support she has adopted policies that have further divided an already divided nation. In supposed furtherance of a strong republic, as well as in the belief that those institutions are the sure guarantee of the survival of her government, she has, for example, allowed the police and military free rein in city and countryside.
Police abuses have escalated as a result, free expression and free assembly being among the casualties. The police today habitually prevent people from joining demonstrations critical of government, in some instances even asking them for permits not only to assemble but also to join a demonstration.
There are near martial-law conditions in many parts of the Philippine countryside, and even in certain areas of Metro Manila. In Tanay, Rizal, for example, a group of University of the Philippines students doing their undergraduate theses, and who were staying in the house of a city councilor, were terrorized by the local CAFGU with threats of liquidation because they “looked like NPA” guerrillas. In other parts of Luzon and the Visayas, it has become routine in remote areas to be stopped at checkpoints, and for “suspicious-looking” people to be hauled off to the nearest military detachment for “tactical interrogation.”
The Arroyo administration has also looked the other way when it comes to graft and official wrongdoing, in some cases by some of the highest officials of the country. The tales of corruption in the present government have reached legendary levels, the amounts involved now being in dollars and not in devalued—and steadily declining—pesos.
To assure US government support for her government Mrs. Arroyo has also reversed, in possible violation of the Constitution, the decade-long process that began in 1990 toward the country’s military de-engagement with the United States. She has done this through her policy to involve US troops in the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf as well as the armed social movements which she has also demonized as “terrorist” and against whose leaders she has allowed the military to concoct a plan to imprison on false charges.
She has signed a supposed “executive agreement”—to the outrage of the Senate, including the members of her own coalition in that chamber—which commits the country to the rest and recreation of foreign troops and the refueling and maintenance of their air and seacraft, without prior consultation with the rest of the country.
These are divisive policies and acts. What they amount to is the unification behind her only of some groups and sectors, and the exclusion of others who may actually have something to say about addressing the country’s multiplying problems.
These others are the Left, which despite its involvement in People Power 2 was excluded from participation in the new government from day one; the vast number of organizations representing a host of concerns (from texting freedom to environmental destruction) that have no voice in government; the poorest classes in Philippine society including the homeless, the very poor and the landless peasantry; the professional class whose representation in government is at best limited; and yes—the overseas Filipino workers, hailed as the new heroes of the Republic, but nevertheless ignored in policy-and decision-making.
To this group of the excluded we can only partly include the opposition, which despite its whining, does have representation in government via the House and the Senate, and which the Arroyo administration would not mind winning over.
The official political opposition in this country has never been unrepresented in government. There is little to distinguish it from the administration except its designation, because it shares the same views and the same aspirations to power at any cost with it.
It could come to power tomorrow and no one would notice the difference—which means that while we could grant it formal representation in any government of national unity, it should be the last that anyone should be thinking of in the creation of such an entity. The first would be the marginalized, the voiceless, the unrepresented and those who do have a vision of this country’s future and who are prepared to realize it.
This is to believe that, a government of national unity having been imagined, it can be turned into reality. That of course is the biggest question of all—whether, in the present circumstances, and given the political elite’s demonstrated incapacity and unwillingness to look beyond its immediate interests for the sake of the country and its people—it is at all a realistic, because realizable proposal. It probably isn’t, and there’s the tragedy.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, Deember 10, 2002)